Forum Discussion
NimbostratusWhat is the best way to view an old configuration (UI or CLI)?
Can we deploy a temporary (disconnected) VE and restore the configs? It seems you can't upload .ucs files to iHealth to inspect.
We recently migrated from hardware F5 BIG-IP platforms to VEs, and now need to check how logging was configured since we're getting tons of logs from them now, so we can compare configurations. I made a .ucs config backup file for each node before wiping them for decommissioning, but not a QKView file, so we can't upload the .ucs file to iHealth to troubleshoot.
If I deployed a VE to a test environment (without active network connections), could we load/restore the .ucs backup so that we could view settings in the UI (preferable) or CLI? Is there a better way to view previous settings/configs? If this is possible, do we need to deploy the VE as the same exact firmware version? We also jumped from 15.1.x to 17.1.x when we migrated to the VEs from the 5250v platform and the configs we need to view are for 15.1.x. Thanks in advance.
I would highly recommend using Visual Studio Code and installing "The F5 Extension". It has a feature called "Config Explorer" which will allow you to import your UCS file and browse all the configuration files on the BIG-IP very easily:
The F5 Extension on Visual Studio Code - Config Explorer
The UCS file is essentially just an archive. So alternatively, you could also just open it up with software such as 7zip / Winrar and then browse through the directories to the bigip configuration files.
If I deployed a VE to a test environment (without active network connections), could we load/restore the .ucs backup so that we could view settings in the UI (preferable) or CLI? Is there a better way to view previous settings/configs? If this is possible, do we need to deploy the VE as the same exact firmware version?
Yes, you would need to deploy the VE with the exact same firmware version that the UCS was originally saved in (15.1.x), otherwise it will fail to load.
You should also copy the F5 master key from the old device to the new VM otherwise the UCS may fail to load due to decryption errors (should you have any encrypted passwords / passphrases in the old device's configuration)
More details about the F5 master key here
On the new VM, you would load the UCS from the original device using the following command:
tmsh load sys ucs <PATH TO UCS FILE> no-license platform-migrateSo in summary, if you absolutely need to view the configuration via the UI (BIG-IP Configuration Utility), then loading the UCS file from TMSH using the command above would be your best bet. But, you need to be mindful that you may need to copy the F5 master key from the old device to the new VM to avoid decryption errors when loading the UCS. You also need to make sure that the F5 BIG-IP software version matches on the new VM.
If you are comfortable viewing the plain text configuration files, then Visual Studio Code with the F5 Extension is the way to go (it would be my preferred option).
aj11Wow, thanks. That's interesting that it's basically just a .rar file. I was able to use tar to unzip the file (though, some files must retain certain permissions, as I could not move or delete them without using admin privs once extracted).
However, we're trying to find logging settings (System -> Logs -> Configuration -> Options) to compare since we're logging much more than we were and might need to tune it down a bit. A quick search through the text in the extracted 'bigip.conf' file didn't find much related to these (I'm not sure what the syntax is to be looking for). Do you know where exactly I could find these settings and in which file?
Hi,
The settings at "System -> Logs -> Configuration -> Options" are stored as BigDB variables.
/config/BigDB.dat
So hopefully you should be able to copy the contents within this file from the old and the new BIG-IP into a text editor and perform a configuration diff to see if there are any differences between the two in terms of the log BigDB variables.
